A fine time was had by all ...
Author: Chris F Carroll
Software Architecture vs Agile Development
I'll be speaking at the International Association of Software Architects UK Summit in April, together with Alan Gawthorpe.
Our subject is "Doing architecture with agile teams" and in a short session we'll be covering both the 'human' angle of working with agile teams and the more technical question of what kind of architecture might count as agile (and is it any better than non-agile architecture).
Apple Official Windows 8 Drivers – BootCamp 5
Apple has at long last published official Windows 8 support - but only for 64 bit Windows and only if you are running OS X 10.8.3. A tad irritating if, as on my machine, Windows 8 installed itself as 32 bit and not 64 bit.
The small print is at Boot Camp 5: Frequently asked questions
When Agile isn’t Agile
Reading I Fear Our Mobile Group Being Forced To Follow Scrum crystallised in my mind what can go wrong when you treat Agile as a methodology. It describes a team successfully using kanban which is to potentially be required to use scrum — because that's becoming the company standard.
Making a team follow an agile methodology is exactly *not* Agile.
Agile is "Individuals and interactions" being valued more highly than processes. Imposing Scrum looks like valuing the process more than the team.
Agile is "self-organising teams" and letting "the team [reflect] on how to become more effective, then tune and adjust accordingly." Imposing conformity on a team that has already adjusted is a backwards step; you're asking a team that has optimised somewhat for the individuals in the team to de-optimise again.
This doesn't mean that you can't teach an agile team anything. The manifest starts with "We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it." A team that can't be corrected, or won't learn better ways, isn't agile. For that matter, a team that won't learn in any walk of life has started the downhill path to decline.
For what it's worth, I'm sure that a competent lean team that tries Scrum for a while will learn from it, even if they end up optimising back to something more fluid.